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Wednesday, 10 June 2015

Every Scrap is Sacred!

I have dedicated this week to developing my quilt kits.
These have been in the back of my mind for years, even before working for
Doughty’s! Now that I have a few patterns under my belt, I feel it's time to move
on to pre-cut kits. I do love a pre-cut, and having spent time helping customers choose colours for their projects, I know that not everyone is confident when it comes to colour co-ordination. Enter the pre-cut - where the hard work of matching fabrics is all done for you and you can get on with the sewing!

After much deliberation, I have settled on
what fabric I want to use, and am now working on getting some of the million
ideas that go around my brain daily onto paper! As I am determined to actually try out all my patterns
before publishing them, I like to practice with my own stash first before
cutting into anything new and ‘special’. Today however, I really have outdone
myself!

A few months ago I ran a quilt workshop for Doughty’s on my Whirlwind
of Colour quilt – one of my designs for John Louden.
Before the class I had to pre cut some jelly rolls using my Sizzix Big Shot Pro
and their four-strip die… a very nice bit of kit! Anyway, I tend to cut a metre
of fabric at a time, so the only wastage are thin strips cut from the folded edges
and I put these in a bag with a half-hearted idea of doing something with them
one day... sad I know!

Now, as I was sitting with my sketchbook the other night,
half an eye on the TV, something stirred at the back of my brain, and out popped
this…. Something to do with all those strips!

I knew some of the block would have to be foundation-pieced,
but felt to have the whole centre strip done like this would drive me mad when
it came to taking the papers out. So I decided to try something I’ve not done
before – string piecing, or stitch-and-flip I think some call it. I made up a
couple of panels using muslin as a foundation. I then drew up the foundation
block, worked out the measurements for the white strips and grey triangles, and
made up four gorgeous looking blocks, don’t you love them!!!

I think I’ll border it in white, or maybe grey, I’m not
sure… but definitely with more strips for the binding. Just goes to show, every
scrap is worth keeping! Oh dear, what have I said!?!

There will be a pattern for this very soon, once I've turned it into something... so watch this space.

8 comments:

Thank you very much, I am so pleased with how it turned out, just need to make more now! :) If you would like more quilty fun, why not pop along to sewmotion.com where I have more patterns and quilting know-how. :)

Sometimes when my scraps are too small I get very overwhelmed with sorting and weeding out what's usable and what's not, so I fear a lot gets tossed by the wayside.

I would love to see some kind of tutorial using muslin as a foundation as you mentioned. I somehow don't mind taking all the papers out, but with so many strips like yours I could see where it could be a patience tester. Nice start.

Hi Allison, thank you, I'm glad you liked my block. When I used muslin for the base of my foundation strips, I didn't mark my sewing lines, I just went with whatever the width of my next strip was, pinned that in place on top of the preceeding strip, sew, press back and repeat. I suppose it was a little more crazy patchwork than the precise foundation piecing. Hope that helps, I will do a tutorial on this soon, and make more blocks similar... in fact I'm thinking of making a kit from this design, but in solids... what do you think?